Apple's iTunes 7.0.2.16 running under Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 on an Intel Core 2 Duo HP notebook, driving me CRAZY with skipping problems!I love iTunes and have used it for over three years despite some troubles and in spite of an intense dislike of DRM. The latest update, iTunes 7, integrated CoverFlow to let users see their album cover art as they browse their collection. I quite like it.

But iTunes 7 has a major flaw on some systems under Windows XP. It skips. Not entire tracks, just bits and pieces of audio in the middle of a track. I'll be listening to a tune, into the beat, and suddenly it skips 100-250 milliseconds forward and the beat is off. Ug! Not only is it annoying, it makes iTunes 7 absolutely unusable for listening to music or podcasts, or playing video.

When playing video, the audio skips forward but the video remain where it should. For a few seconds or even as long as a minute or two, the audio and video will remain out of sync, then suddenly iTunes decides to correct things by speeding up the video frame rate or stuttering forward.

Fortunately, this skipping issue hasn't affected my Windows XP Media Center Edition workstation that's attached to larger speakers, so I can still enjoy my music that way. Nor does it affect my iPod.

There is no music file corruption since I can play the exact same audio file in my iTunes library using VLC and it plays perfectly.

Unfortunately the oft-suggested fixes found by googling for itunes skipping of checking one's sound driver settings and the QuickTime preferences don't do a thing to solve my problem. I even went so far as to totally remove iTunes and QuickTime from my system, clean out the registry and any left-over files, then reinstalling newly downloaded versions. No good.

So is this a Conexant HD audio driver problem on my HP notebook, or a Windows XP quirk, or perhaps is it some strange multi-CPU issue? I doubt it, since other software plays back the exact same music files flawlessly on the same hardware with the same drivers. Also, iTunes 5 (the version I was using before) worked flawlessly.

Help, Apple! Please, fix this problem. I want my iTunes back!

Update: 11 December 2006

The probem remains on my laptop. Fortunately for me, I'm swapping my Windows XP notebook for an Apple Macbook, so I won't care about the issue so much unless I encounter it on the Mac as well.

I've had two others contact me with the identical problem. I've included their questions/comments below. I wish I had a positive response, but I don't.

Sami 10 December 2006Chris 10 December 2006

Jake (Jack Elam) and Sheriff Jason McCullough (James Garner) decide how to divvy up future gold mining spoils in Support Your Local Sheriff!Isn't it wonderful that utility companies (say Questar Gas) and municipalities (say the City of St. George, Utah) love to charge "convenience fees" if you choose to pay your bill online on their web sites using a credit card? (For the sarcasm impaired, quit reading now.)

From the movie Support Your Local Sheriff!:Now I ask: "Convenient for whom? You mean convenient for you and costly for me!"

There's absolutely nothing convenient about paying more money just for the privilege of paying a bill. Nothing at all.

Yes, I understand that accepting credit card payments does mean the credit card company takes a small bite out of the paid amount. If that was a valid excuse, big retailers would charge a "convenience fee" for swiping a credit card at the cash register. Instead any cost overhead is built into the overall cost infrastructure. Why can't municipalities and utility companies do the same?

In fact, it may be argued that processing of traditional pay-by-mail or drive-up paper-check payments may be more expensive in time (human resources) and thus money than a quick electronic transaction, even with transaction fee overheads.

Since St. George and Questar both want to charge me extra for me making things simpler (no manual check processing), I'll stick with using my bank's free online bill pay system. That means that unless each company has set up an electronic bill-pay acceptance system with whatever processing or clearinghouse my bank uses, they'll keep getting a paper check in the mail printed out by my bank.

Why did I want to use a credit card in the first place? Well I like to earn "cash back" by using a card to pay for everything then paying the entire new balance off each month to avoid any fees or interest. All while my paycheck sits accumulating interest in a savings account until it's time to make that monthly credit card payment.

Yup, I'm cheap that way. I love to save and earn an extra buck.

I love cash back. I even went for the Costco Executive Membership just to get the annual 2% reward, and now the membership more than pays for itself every year. Sweet!

Bottom line? I hate "convenience fees" of any sort. They're not convenient. Especially when electronic payments make things more convenient for the organization doing the charging.

Tell you what, Questar and St. George, how about I send you a bill. The line-item will be an "annoyance fee" I charge all billers who want to charge me for the privilege of paying them. I'd go for it if you'd pay up!

I've been impressed this past year with all the excellent things I hear about the Opera web browser. I'm a die-hard Firefox browser user myself, but I nevertheless appreciate the work being done on other web browsers.

So imagine my chagrin when, after installing Opera verison 9 on my computer, I discover that I can't log on to a family web site that I and members of my family use regularly to communicate with one another. Firefox works just fine on the site, but Opera, which has superior CSS rendering, is smaller, and is faster than Firefox, chokes.

It was totally a surprise.

To diagnose the problem, I had to whip out the Ethereal network sniffer/analyzer and watch the raw HTTP traffic between Opera and the web server. I was further surprised to see that the problem was Opera's fault, and not the web site's problem (which at first I had suspected).

It seems that Opera has a problem consistently sending cookies back to a web site that sets them. Further, it seems that this only happens when Opera has the "Accept only cookies from the site I visit" configuration option set. (And indeed, this is how I had my Opera browser configured, because I prefer to only accept cookies directly from web sites I visit.)

I've created a pair of browser bug demonstration pages. Check them out here: http://www.adg.us/operabug.html

A little googling around, and I see that Opera 9 has had some odd cookie problems for quite a while, even during beta. Why the excellent Opera programmers (who have a browser that passes the stressful Acid 2 Test while Firefox still has troubles) haven't fixed this yet astonishes me.

So please, if you're an Opera programmer, please, please, PLEASE fix this bug! (Thanks in advance!)

Update: April 2007 - Version 9.10 of Opera under Mac OS X and also under Windows XP do not have this bug. Thanks, Opera programmers!

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's ChestLast week I finally got around to seeing Pirates of the Caribbean II: Electric Boogaloo--Er, no, um--I mean Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest.

What a blast! I loved it! It was every bit as much fun as the first movie.

I particularly liked the slapstick humor of the first big adventure chase as the heros attempted to escape from the cannibals. I was cracking up all through it. The other big chase after the chest later in the movie was great too.

While I was watching the movie, little did I know that Captain Jack Sparrow apparently likes the Caribbean so much that he spent some of his loot and bought himself his own private 35- or 45-acre Caribbean island, Little Hall's Pond Cay in the Bahamas.

I discovered this fact sometime this week--I don't recall how. But once I'd heard that Johnny Depp had his own private island, I was curious where exactly it was. Unfortunately, googling for information didn't reveal any GPS coordinates.

One web site did mention the name of the island: Little Hall's Pond Cay. It said it was out in the Out Islands (the Northern Exumas) of the Bahamas. (I'd never heard of the Exumas before.)

With a little searching, I learned that there was an island called Hall's Pond Cay that is part of the Exuma Cays Land and Sea Park. Once I knew this, a little more googling found a web site with a map of the Exumas with Hall's Pond Cay clearly labelled. With that map in one window, and Google Maps in another, it was easy to scan the satellite photos of the Caribbean in the area of the Bahamas and quickly find the island in question. Little Hall's Pond Cay had to be nearby.

Another search turned up a picture or two of Little Hall's Pond Cay. Using that photo as a reference, I compared the island outline against Google's imagery and was able to conclusively pinpoint Little Hall's Pond Cay as a smaller island immediately adjacent, south-by-southeast of Hall's Pond Cay.

If anyone's wondering what the GPS coordinates are, according to Google Maps, the coordinates are:Here's a Google Earth .kmz file marker with both islands labelled.



I'm 100% sure I've got the two islands correctly identified and located. I found an ariel photo of Hall's Pond Cay (the larger non-Depp-owned island) here: http://windom.cybox.com/photos/exumas_aerial/halls_pond.jpg

For more information on the Exuma Cays Land & Sea Park, check out this web site: http://www.nature.org/wherewework/caribbean/bahamas/wherewework/art8287.html

Having completed my Bahamas cay digression, let me finish on-topic: I eagerly await next year's release of Pirates III: Electric Beaglee. (Arr! Curses! That just doesn't work.)

Update: This article was edited to make corrections to the G.P.S. coordinates and to make clear that there are two islands sharing the name "Hall's Pond Cay", the one belonging to Depp prefixed with "Little" -- Thanks to those who let me know I had initially mistakenly marked the larger Hall's Pond Cay as Depp's private island, having assumed that there was only one island.

Do you ever reminisce and wonder what would have happened if you'd done just done one tiny little thing differently?

Back in 1994, back when the Internet and the web was just beginning to really take off, and back when domain names (you know, those things that often end in .com) were free to anyone who wanted to register one, I registered southwest.com.

I live in the desert southwest of the United States, and in the southwestern corner of Utah. I thought the domain name sounded cool, and could be used to start an Internet company, perhaps named "Southwest Internet Services" or something.

I also registered lds.net, in part because I happen to be LDS, and uv.com because it was a two-letter domain and it was the very last two-letter .com domain available at the time (excluding domain names with digits in them).

Then in 1995 the InterNIC was authorized to start charging money for domain registrations. That put a crimp in my style, as I was but a poor college student. I decided to let my registration of lds.net and uv.com expire.

But southwest.com was just a cool domain, so I scrounged up $50 and hung on to it.

Here's a copy of my (rather ugly) and useless web site looked like back in 1996 and 1997:

• December 1996
• February 1997

Then in 1997, I decided to sell the domain to Southwest Airlines (who at that time used www.iflysw.com as their domain name). I sold it for a few thousand dollars in cash and some airline tickets, a package worth significantly less than $10,000.00 US in total value. At the time, I thought it was a pretty good deal.

Looking back now, I should have hung on to the domain for another ten years and put the domain into use as I'd originally intended. What if I had? I suspect I'd have had offers to buy the domain for amounts far greater, likely in the hundreds-of-thousands at least. Perhaps I'd even be a millionaire.

Oh well!

As for uv.com, who knows who registered it after I let my registration lapse. I wish I'd kept it so I could have a 2-letter .com domain. As it is, I later registered eq.net and formed a Utah LLC that uses it today.

Not too long after the lds.net registration lapsed, Burgoyne Computers in Salt Lake City, Utah registered that domain. The Internet Archive has some archived copies of some of their older web pages. It looks like today they still own it and use it for web mail services. Burgoyne Internet Services, L.L.C. is listed as the current owner.

I don't look back with regret at all for having missed out on better capitalizing on the southwest.com domain. I couldn't see the future. A few thousand dollars cash was a lot of money to a single guy in his mid 20s. And the plane tickets were a blast.

With the plane tickets, I flew out to Washington D.C. and stayed a week with my friend who was working at the time as an intern for Idaho Senator Larry Craig. I met the senator and many of his staff. My friend also gave me an insiders tour of the U.S. Capitol building, taking me out onto the floor of the Senate chambers.

During the day while he worked, I wandered around all over the mall, loving the D.C. Metro, enjoying exploring the Capitol and office buildings of the Senate and House on my own, and the mini-subway that connected them to the Capitol building. (Remember, this was all pre-9/11. I wonder today if perhaps some random person were wandering around much like I did then, if security would pick them up for questioning.)

I also did other D.C. tourist things, like take the tour of the White House (and since it was around Christmas time, the tour guides passed out little Christmas cards from the Clintons to all tour members), ride the elevator to the top of the Washington Monument, visit the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum (which I remembered and loved from when I visited it as a teenager while on a high school band trip), visit the Lincoln Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial, the National Archives, take the tour at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing (where they print money), tour the U.S. Treasury Building right next to the White House, visit the Holocaust Museum, as well as many other things.

Although I was there an entire week, I still just scrached the surface, not having explored the other Smithsonian offerings, not explored Georgetown, not having visited the Arlington National Cemetery, nor the many, many, many other places in and around D.C.

So as you can see, it doesn't bother me to have missed out on the profit potential that the southwest.com domain might have had, had I kept it. I sold it. I had a blast with the proceeds. The enjoyable experiences in my memories are priceless.

But it is fun to imagine sometimes, "What if?"

Thumbnail image of Killer Robots campaign flyerLast year, when my sister was running for a spot on her high school student body Executive Council, for the fun of it I registered a domain, voteforjuje.com and put up a web site for her campaign.

Now the domain registration has run out. voteforjuje.com no longer exists (unless someone else has since registered that domain themselves and put up a web site).

For the fun of it, I've archived the web site. It's available here:I quite like the poster and flyer art work my other sister Janna did for the campaign. Some samples are on the above archived web site.

It was fun working on bits of a soundtrack for Juje's campaign skit using the freely-available Audacity audio software.

I also had fun coming up with the wacky little one-to-two-line campaign slogans that appears in italics at the bottom of the black-backgrounded portion of the page, selected randomly from among eight. If you reload the page, you may get a different one.

Though my sister didn't win, she had fun running and Janna and I enjoyed helping her.

Rest In Peace, voteforjuje.com!

Fascinating Sky Over the Rio VirginCache Found: A Bridge Over Troubled Water by call2teachfamily

Saturday, 28 January 2006 - 5:00 PM MST (-0700)

Found at last!

Nests on the BridgeYou might not know it, but there's been an unregistered cache hidden only 50 feet away in the rocks by the trail since March of 2003 (Wednesday, 19 March 2003 at 3:45 PM MST (-0700) to be precise). I hid it when my sister from Colorado was visiting, then promptly forgot to register it with Geocaching.com. I even visited it again in the summer of 2003 (Saturday, 20 Sept. 2003 at 7:00 PM MDT (-0600), with a friend) with the intent to register it.

The Setting SunThat's what I get for not being diligent in registering it with www.geocaching.com. Besides, I love the name you picked for this cache, and I love the little bit of history of the Quail Creek Reservoir dike-break flood of 01 January 1989 washing out the bridge that you included in the cache, call2teachfamily!

Spiky SilhouetteI took a Dory toy (You know, Dory from "Finding Nemo") and left a "Polar Express" DVD in exchange.

Riverside Grass SilhouetteAnother SilhouetteAfter writing in the log book, I extracted the old 2003 cache from the nook in the rocks by the bike/walking trail. Apparently it didn't survive the January floods of 2005 unscathed. It was completely submerged by the flood. In spite of an otherwise weather-proof plastic jar container, the contents inside were still soaked, though the log book was only damp, having had an additional layer of protection in the form of a ziploc plastic bag.

It was surprising to see that lewmil, who registered a find of this cache on the 13th of December 2005, apparently stumbled across my old unregistered cache a day earlier on the 12th, and made a note entry in the log book. Wow! That's funny.

Sky Over Bloomington HillPower Pole SilhouetteI've removed the unregistered cache so no one else will accidentally find it and think that it it this cache. I'll go hid it somewhere else once I clean it up and dry it out.

Thanks, call2teachfamily, for a fun evening find!

Oh, and the sunset was absolutely stunning. I stuck around for over an hour just to watch the colors change in the sky.

Then I grew impatient and left shortly before the sun broke through the clouds on the horizon and lit up the whole sky in a blaze of glorious color, illuminating the clouds from beneath. When I did notice, looking up out my car window, I immediately pulled over and snapped a few more pictures of the sky.

-Astounding
St. George, Utah

A Spiral Galaxy (NGC 3370)Okay, I'm a sucker for Hubble Space Telescope images. Two images, in fact. Following up after my previous post of two stunning Hubble images, I've got to add a few more. The first is of NGC 3370, a spiral galaxy, and the second is of NGC 1300, a barred spiral galay, the same type of galaxy as our own Milky Way galaxy is (which was once thought to be a plain spiral, but is now believed to be a barred spiral).

Once again, many thanks to the excellent web site, hubblesite.org, for the source images..

A Barred Spiral Galaxy (NGC 1300)Like the earlier images, the source images for these desktop backgrounds are in the public domain (see the hubblesite.org copyright page).

To view or download the full-sized widescreen 1920x1200 desktop wallpaper images, click or right-click on the following links:

• A Spiral Galaxy (1920x1200).jpg (NGC 3370)
  Courtesy NASA, The Hubble Heritage Team, and A. Riess (STScI)
  
• A Barred Spiral Galaxy (1920x1200).jpg (NGC 1300)
  Courtesy NASA, ESA, and The Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

While these two galaxy pictures are nice, they're not nearly as colorful as the earlier images, but they still appeal to me.

After having removed my old email address off this web site to slow the flow of unsolicited, unwanted messages from spammers whose robot crawlers periodically visit my site searching new addresses to spam, I intended to add a web form for visitors to use if they needed to contact me. Unfortunately, I've been a slacker

I hereby repent! You can now click the Contact Me button on the left side-panel menu to send me a message if so needed.

Fun, huh!

Oh, and since commenting on articles and posts doesn't work on my site, if you have something impressive to say about an article, feel free to use the Contact Me function to send the comment to me. If you do, please, please, please include the full web address (URL) of the article so I know what you're commenting about.

Maybe someday I'll get comments working...

Yeah, that'll happen soon... *laugh*

Update (27 January 2006): Thanks go to my sister for using the new contact form to alert me of an unfortunate typo. Unfortunately somehow lost an e. It has been remedied. The missing e has been found.

Orion NebulaI came across this stunning high resolution image of the Orion Nebula from the Hubble Space Telescope at the www.hubblesite.org web site this morning. So I downloaded the highest resolution version I could find, then trimmed it to fit a 1920x1200 computer desktop.

Yeah, I admit it, I love my Dell UltraSharp 2405FPW 24" LCD monitor. The image looks wonderful on it.

Center of the Milky Way GalaxyA few days later (I'm writing this paragraph on the 14th of January), I ran into another gorgeous high resolution image, this one of the center of the galaxy. I trimmed it to 1920x1200 to try it out too.

Because the source images for these are in the public domain (see the hubblesite.org copyright page and the Spitzer Space Telescope Image Use Policy for more information), they can be freely distributed and derivitave works can be freely created.

To view or download the full-sized widescreen 1920x1200 desktop wallpaper images, click or right-click on the following links:

• The Orion Nebula (1920x1200).jpg
  Courtesy NASA, ESA, M. Robberto (Space Telescope Science Institute/ESA) and the Hubble Space Telescope Orion Treasury Project Team
  
• Center of the Milky Way Galaxy (1920x1200).jpg
  Courtesy NASA, JPL-Caltech, S. Stolovy (SSC/Caltech)

My many thanks go out to the many folks who worked to produce such marvelous images of the magnificent universe in which we reside.